Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is based on a lie. It's been happening since the mid 70s when US economist Milton Friedman & Austrian/British economist Friedrich Hayek finally threw out the long standing economic traditions of British economist John Maynard Keynes, (who had focussed on government policy to avoid the problems of unplanned market forces made clear in the 1929 crash), and replaced it with a return to *unrestrained competition*. Neoliberalism took up this argument with a passion.

All the pundits have been banging on about how most of us don't make up our minds about who we'll vote for in an election until a few days, or even hours, before we enter the little booth to leave our mark on democracy.

Well, I don't know about you but I pretty much made up my mind at birth; I could never vote for a Tory and my class loyalty comes first.

And it's too close to call (maybe), Labor is going to take some seats of the Coalition, a handful of Greens and independents will sit in the lower house and the Senate will be another dog's breakfast.

Protest on Nauru

Every day since 20 March, asylum seekers on Nauru have demonstrated in the family camp, OPC3, against almost three years of detention in appalling conditions on Nauru.

While Malcolm Turnbull boasts that there are no longer children in closed detention in Australia, he wilfully holds children, women and families in detention in mouldy tents, and confined, with no future on Nauru.

We’re at that stage of the election campaign where many people have had enough. “I just switch off”, we hear, or “politicians are all the same”. Yet we rarely hear about a loss of interest in gossip about Mariah Carey’s wedding, or Johnny Depp’s divorce, or anything at all about the Kardashians. In fact, the world’s massively rich and successful entertainment industry is predicated on humans’ insatiable appetite for the minutiae of dross.

The NBN has long been a dream of many Australians; fast ubiquitous broadband that can keep pace with our ever growing data needs. It was a modest plan in many ways, portrayed by opponents as the ‘Rolls Royce of broadband plans’. Nothing could be further from the truth.

One thing that the world of Twitter has taught me is that, if the Liberal Party is a very broad church, as someone or other is always saying, the Left is simply a place without walls or windows or doors. It is bound by nothing. But it took Twitter to make this clear.